Sharp Performance Raises $12M Seed Round to Scale Performance Coaching for First Responders

We founded the Sharp Performance coaching platform to give public safety professionals support that works for them. 

Our mission is simple: extend the careers and lives of public safety professionals by providing proactive, trusted coaching tailored to the realities of their demanding work.

Sharp’s platform connects public safety professionals to coaches with high-risk backgrounds—former Navy SEALs, Green Berets, police officers, and firefighters. We believe that a preventative conversation with someone who has lived similar experiences carries more weight than a conversation with a clinician who may have the credentials but cannot fully relate to the daily realities of the job. It’s working.

Patrick Butler, Fire Chief of the Redondo Beach Fire Department and former Assistant Chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, called Sharp “the most important thing I have for the health and safety of firefighters in my over three decades in the fire service.” It’s because of this impact that, in the last 15 months, Sharp has grown from working with a single agency to over 50, and boasts voluntary engagement numbers of nearly 40% across all partners, nearly 20x the industry standard. And we’re just getting started.

Today, we are proud to announce a $12 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from A*, Commonweal Ventures, Formation, SV Angel, and Liquid 2. This investment from a16z’s American Dynamism team is consistent with their mission to invest in companies that support the national interest, and validates the size and growing awareness of the problem Sharp is solving. This capital will be used to expand across go-to-market and coaching functions as well as product and engineering, adding to our first-class team that already includes operators from the U.S. Special Operations community and from generational tech companies like Uber, DoorDash, Flock Safety, Headspace, and Strava.

First responders face more trauma in a single week than most people will in a lifetime. The impact is staggering. Divorce rates reach as high as 70%, substance abuse affects as many as 30%, and suicide claims more lives than the line of duty. And the unfortunate reality is that these harrowing statistics are significantly underreported. 

Nearly $500 billion per year is spent in the global mental health and wellness industry, yet it has completely failed to serve a significant portion of the population, particularly the men and women in public safety. Traditional solutions are too often reactive, disconnected from the culture, or led by providers with no shared experience in the roles they aim to support. Stigma and mistrust keep many from engaging at all. We built Sharp to close that gap. 

Our conviction is rooted in our team's own experiences. Sharp Co-Founder and Head of Customer Success Andrew Sakmar, a former U.S. Army Green Beret officer, saw the impact of coaching firsthand. Toward the end of his Special Forces career, Andrew had the opportunity to work with performance coaches, and saw how it improved his effectiveness in the field, strengthened his leadership, and helped his relationships at home. He knew this model could serve others in high-risk professions and shared his insight with Ben Curley, Co-Founder and CEO of Sharp.

Ben was a Wall Street salesman who had left the financial world intending to build a company serving the public safety community. He had tried therapy unsuccessfully, and held a deep skepticism toward the mental health industry as a whole. “I could never connect with the therapist,” says Ben. “It never seemed like we understood one another, and it never felt like it was going anywhere. But I immediately loved the idea of working with a performance coach with a Special Operations background; someone who was more of a peer or a mentor, whose experience and perspective I would value. And I knew there were millions of others who felt the same way.” Together, Andrew and Ben’s experiences formed the foundation of Sharp’s coaching platform. 

“Traditional mental healthcare approaches to diagnosis, therapy, and psychiatric medication have been tried for years with public safety professionals, military veterans, and other high-risk populations. The reality is they simply have not worked at scale for these groups, and often do far more harm than good. What I have seen instead is that peer-to-peer coaching, when delivered in a subclinical and preventative way with a physiology-first approach, has been incredibly effective for this population,” said Dr. Chris Frueh, one of the world’s leading researchers on the health and performance of military and public safety professionals, and Sharp’s Head of Coaching Engagement.

Dr. Frueh has spent three decades at the forefront of this field. A clinical psychologist and acclaimed researcher with over 325 scientific publications, he has worked directly with special operators across all branches of the U.S. military and with many of our partner-nation forces. He is the author of Operator Syndrome, Firefighter Syndrome, and a forthcoming publication on law enforcement professionals. “Sharp is driving a paradigm shift in how we can immediately improve the health of high-risk professionals and optimize their performance. I joined the Sharp team because I have never seen any other approach deliver such powerful and lasting impacts.” said Dr. Frueh.

We’ve proven that there is demand for Sharp across the country. This new round of funding allows us to meet that need at scale and make trusted, proactive coaching the standard of support for public safety professionals everywhere. Forward!